


Body Heat

by ferggirl



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 03:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/pseuds/ferggirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have a mission on a glacier in Chile. What's the worst that could happen?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alessandralee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandralee/gifts).



> Pre-midseason finale, because I wasn't ready to lose Coulson.

Jemma has been to Chile before. Santiago, in the middle of the southern summer, on a balmy January expedition to investigate a Chilean colleague’s new species claims. 

This is nothing like that.

They land in Punta Arenas and the team hangs back to let Ward and his seven languages negotiate their passage by helicopter to the Marinelli Glacier. 

The wind is bitter and Jemma thinks wistfully of the winter layers she left in her parents’ downstairs closet. 

"I’ll be traveling a bunch, yes, Mum," she’d said. "But I’m sure my employer will make sure I’ve got proper attire."

Fitz threatens a formal complaint and is left in the warm plane to process the data as it comes in. Jemma looks down at the down coat that seems to barely slow the encroaching chill, and reminds herself that she’s necessary personnel. This is what she wanted. In the field.

The team’s too large to use any of the helicopters that normally make the tourist trip, so Ward books them two pilots. 

"I’d rather May and myself fly us out there, sir," he murmurs as Coulson pays the tab.

"When was the last time you landed on a glacier?" Coulson shakes his head. "Stick with the local expertise on this one."

Jemma and Skye look to Agent May for reassurance, but she’s stony faced and busy indicating on the map where she wants the pilots to drop them. 

Jemma is fighting nausea when Grant looks back at her.

"You ok, Simmons?"

"Of course I am," she strives for a jocular tone. "I’m freezing, about to get into an unstable metal container held in the air by four blades and hope, and land on a glacier in the name of science. I’m brilliant."

Ward doesn’t look convinced, but Skye grins. “My first glacier! Don’t tell me,” she glares when May raises an eyebrow “this is number five?”

"Seven. You’re with me. Coulson?"

"Let’s split up our first-timers," he says thoughtfully. "I’ll go with Simmons in the other bird."

"No!" It bursts out of her before she can help herself. They all turn, with varying degrees of confusion and expectation on their faces. 

It’s not that she doesn’t want to ride with Coulson. But who wants their boss to see them have a total and complete meltdown in a small space?

"I just - wouldn’t it be better if you were in the first helicopter? First on scene and all that?" she explains weakly. 

Ward, bless him, catches on fast enough. “She’s right, sir. There will be a delay between landings. Better to get you up first.”

The first three hop into their aircraft and Skye gives a gleeful wave that Jemma returns with a glum smile. 

"That nervous, huh?" Ward’s holding out a pair of gloves that look much warmer than the little stretchy ones she’d found in her sock drawer. "You seemed to be getting over the heights thing."

"I am, but helicopters have never been a favorite," she slides her hands into the gloves with a happy sigh, then notices that they’re still warm. Her keen powers of observation lead her to check  _his_ hands, which are bare. “You can’t give me your gloves, Ward!”

"Well it was that or highly inappropriate body heat." He winks at her in a very un-superspy way. "You looked cold."

Jemma flushes the entire length of the helicopter ride. Every time his knee brushes hers (and it happens a surprising number of times considering the smoothness of the flight) the heat rises to her cheeks again. It’s distracting enough that she briefly entertains the suspicion that he is doing it on purpose.

But he wouldn’t. Would he?

Then they’re at the landing site, and in front of them there’s fire and ice and confusion, and her heart drops and his hand finds hers. 

"Fitz! Fitz, what happened?" she calls over her comms, but there’s only silence and static.

"Simmons, I need you to stay very close to me," he orders, pulling out his weapon and bracing against the snow kicked up by the helicopter.

The pilot is yelling in Spanish and Grant is yelling back and Jemma is cold again, cold to her very core, and when the helicopter touches down Grant pulls her with him, slinging her gear over his back as they cautiously approach the crash site.

She’s not especially surprised when their pilot takes off, leaving them to the smoldering ruins and the ice and the oncoming dark. But she can’t stop thinking about how she has Grant’s gloves, and how cold his hands will be. 

He turns and puts them to her face, and they don’t feel cold at all. “Can you do this? I need you to look.”

"I’m not," she gasps as the panic floods in and steadies herself against his solid weight. "I’m no crash inspector. Fitz would know better."

"Fitz isn’t here," he says. "Stay where I can see you."

So he stands guard over her, facing out into the fading light while she crouches as close to the flames as she can, looking for stress marks, looking for evidence of life… or death.

The pilot is dead. But strangely, it looks from her angle as though his head is caved in from a bullet and not a crash injury. Jemma scrunches her nose as a theory builds. Then she edges around to the far side. The only way the team could have escaped.

She finds footprints. Lots of them. Far more than three people would have made. 

"They- they’re not here," she calls out. "Ward, they survived."

But how? And who else is on this glacier with them?

He looks across the crash at her, his face lit by the flickering light of the flames. His relief is palpable.

Then he looks past her and his face hardens.

"Simmons, get DOWN!"

The gunshots echo above her head. From her spot, faceplanted in the snow, she can see the helicopter’s undercarriage, or what’s left of it. 

There’s a pattern. Fitz would have seen it immediately. Jemma moves her head slightly, flinching as the bullets ping off the smoking chopper. Yes, she’s sure of it now.

This helicopter didn’t crash.

It was on the ground when someone strapped a bomb to it.

Then Ward is there, scooping her up with one arm and shielding her with his body as they move away from the dangerous light of the destroyed helicopter.

Darkness has fallen, and they slide into the safety of the night. The temperature has dropped dramatically, and the wind is picking up. He keeps an arm around her until they stop, ten minutes later. 

"The wind should help cover our trail," he says, peering into the dense black night. "Any luck raising Fitz yet?"

"No," she shakes her head. "It’s as if there’s something blocking the signal. Ward… this was no accident."

He looks down at her, his presence there large and reassuring. “I know. We’ll find them. Or they’ll find us. Don’t count May and Coulson out yet.”

"Or Skye," she says through chattering teeth. "Even if it is her first glacier."

"All right," he crouches down and holds out a hand. "I’m going to need my gloves back."

"Because I don’t look cold anymore?"

He smirks at her, and pulls them from her hands, holding her coat sleeves so she can bring her arms in and cross them against her body. He runs his hands up and down her body a few firm times, and she can’t help but lean into the brisk caress.

"Because it’s time for body heat," he says, using his gloved hands to scoop out a depression in the snow. "Right now my job is to get us through the night."

She doesn’t flush, not this time. She pulls out her useless little gloves and kneels down to help.


	2. Chapter 2

He lets her dig for a few minutes before he catches her numb hands and pulls her back. 

"We’re almost there," he says, "let me finish."

She peels off the wet gloves and stuffs them into her outer pocket. The wind is already chilling the moisture left on her hands. Ward works for a few more minutes and then slides into the little snow cocoon to test its size. He’s bent over and only just able to pull his feet in and Jemma is sure he’s going to say it’s too small.

But he holds out a hand to her. 

"What if the wind changes?" she asks, hovering just outside the shelter. Her face is numb now, and her eyes are watering from the cold wind. "We could get caught with no barrier."

"Simmons." His voice is firm. So are his thigh muscles when she bends down and props her hands on them. "Come on, inside. It’s only going to get colder." She can barely see his face in the darkness, but the sigh he gives as he reaches for her cold hands has her picturing his eyes narrowed and his mouth… no, she’s not going to picture his mouth.

"We can just build a wall of snow if that happens anyway," she murmurs, letting him draw her up along his body. She’s so much shorter that when she bends her legs, her feet wind up somewhere by his knees and her hips settle into the snow next to his waist.

The wind is muffled in here. The darkness just makes him seem larger. He’s everywhere, solid and strong and sure and warmer than her. She isn’t sure where to put her hands or her head and winds up elbowing him in the side twice. She’s still shivering.

"Unzip your coat," he says gruffly, moving to do the same. She wants to argue, but she’s not Fitz. She knows that body heat is the best way to keep warm in extreme conditions like this. She just isn’t sure she’s mentally prepared for a night curled around Grant Ward.

He interprets her inaction as an indication that she’s gotten too cold and reaches over to tug her zipper down himself. He guides her arms out of the coat, rubbing each of her hands between his until they sting with renewed bloodflow. Then he tugs her down to him. 

Her head fits into the hollow of his shoulder like it was sculpted for her, and she shivers violently as her body adjusts to the warmth of his. He tucks her long coat around her, making sure to enclose her feet, and secures the edges of it by lying on them. 

Then he zips them up in his own jacket. 

Her shivers subside after a few minutes. He’s pulled his own arms into their little makeshift sleeping bag, and is running his hands up and down her back. The sound of his heartbeat is steady under her ear. 

"Were you flirting with me earlier?" she asks drowsily. 

His hands don’t stop their motion, but she can hear his heart speed up slightly. 

Odd.

"In the helicopter, I mean," she clarifies when he doesn’t answer. "Only it seemed like you were flirting with me to distract me from my violent dislike of helicopters."

This time his hands do stop, and he drapes his arms around her loosely. 

"Did it work?"

She nods against his shoulder. “Highly effective.”

"Good to know," he murmurs into her hair. 

The snow outside is blowing over the top of their shelter, and a little drift is building up next to them. Somewhere out there, May, Coulson and Skye are dealing with their machine-gun wielding welcoming committee. This time when Jemma shivers it’s not from the cold.

Ward tightens his arms around her. “What is it?”

"We’ll find them, right?"

"We’ll find them." 

"And Fitz is fine." She says it aloud to reassure herself. "He’s probably running around the plane like a madman, convinced we’ve all crashed into the ocean…"

One of his hands moves to cover her mouth and stop her nervous flow of words.

"Fitz is fine. He’ll stay on the plane and call for help if he can’t find us."

She wants to argue, but the feel of her lips against his fingers is too intimate to waste on a discussion of Fitz’s tendencies under pressure. 

His thumb is tracing patterns on her cheek. “I can hear your brain working. There’s nothing we can do until we get the sunlight back,” he says. “We preserve our batteries, stay hidden, stay warm. You can be brilliant in the morning.”

She sighs agreement, letting sleep pull at her. Then a thought occurs to Jemma that is so horrifying it breaks the soothing spell he’s cast on her.

"This is my fault," she gasps against his hand. She feels him angle his head to look down at her, and he moves his hand to cup the side of her head. 

"What are you talking about?"

"I panicked when Agent Coulson said he wanted to fly with me. I thought he’d see how unfit for the field I am…" she swallows hard and blinks away the moisture burning in her eyes. "If I’d been more professional, braver, and you’d been on that first helicopter, perhaps you and May and Skye could have…"

He covers her mouth, but this time instead of his fingers he uses his own lips. The kiss is brief, more of a gasp for air and a touching of lips than some great passionate encounter. 

But she can hear his heartbeat. 

"Don’t think that," he says. He pulls back, his lips lingering on her forehead before he tucks her back against him. "Your fear aside, it made sense for Coulson to assess the situation. That’s why I agreed. And we weren’t expecting armed resistance. This was a science mission."

"Right. Not everything is about me," she says bracingly, just to hear the words spoken. 

Not mission decisions. Not body heat, or flirting as distraction, or kissing to shush her.

He is just doing his job.

Ward shifts underneath her, and she winds up bracing her hands on his shoulders, her coat’s hood hanging into her eyes as she looks down through the darkness to the outline of his face.

"Some things are about you," he says, sliding a hand to the back of her neck. He pulls, just a little, and their mouths meet for a second time. 

This is different. This is want, and need, and hunger, and excitement. This makes her forget that she’s buried in a snowbank on a glacier in Chile and slide her hand down his side, looking for heat and skin, and arch into his touch when he does the same. 

This time, when he pulls away, she’s breathing heavily. She rests her forehead against his and smiles in the dark. 

"I’ll keep that in mind," she says.

"You do that," he nods, before his lips find hers again.


End file.
